Blood and tears

This is what we can expect for the foreseeable future:  senseless violence and predictable lies.  This is what we chose.

The bollards that should have kept Shamsud-Din Jabbar from driving his truck into Bourbon Street had not worked right for ten years; this year they were being replaced in preparation for the Superbowl in February.  If you want your city spruced up, bid for the mother of all football games.  I doubt Jabbar knew the fates had made his attack easier.  He lived in Texas, where he was born and grew up.  

We know he was 42 and an army veteran who served in Afghanistan.  Following his divorce, the father of two apparently operated some sort of real estate business out of a trailer while the family continued to live in their house.  No doubt we will learn more about what else happened to "radicalize" him to the point of driving into a festive crowd with an ISIS flag in his vehicle.  We won't learn it from him because he was killed by police.  Some of us don't care about the facts anyway.

For now, the FBI is investigating this mass murder and they don't believe Jabbar acted alone because a Tesla loaded with explosives detonated outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas on the same night.  This cybertruck was driven by Matthew Livelsberger, another army vet from Colorado, also dead.  Both vehicles were rented from Turo, a vehicle-sharing service, as I'm sure hundreds of others were that day, so it could be coincidence.  Apparently the rapist has no comment, since Livelsberger is not a name with which to stir up immigrant hate.  He's probably calculating how much of an insurance claim to file for damage to his hotel.

Not that Americans need any help from terrorists to mark the new year.  In Aliamanu, Hawaii, fireworks killed three people and injured twenty.  The devices were described as "illegal," but does that really matter?  We love the rockets' red glare, whether it's July fourth or a gender-reveal party.  Maybe Brad Spafford was planning one of those with the enormous cache of pipe bombs the FBI says it found last month on his property near Norfolk, Virginia.  Spafford belongs to a far-right club called No Lives Matter, which promotes "targeted attacks, mass killings and criminal activity" including "self-harm and animal abuse," according to the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.  

It doesn't look like Spafford will be able to attend the rapist's "Victory Rally" in Washington on January 19, a thinly veiled tactic for drawing a hate-filled mob to the capital so the next day's festivities won't involve another humiliating vista of empty seats.  

Unlike his predecessor Joe Biden is not locking the White House door, turning off the lights and sneaking out through the kitchen.  Today he's giving the Presidential Citizens Medal to twenty Americans, not one of whom wrote him a big check.  The two who will cause ketchup to be flung are Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney, but all contributed to civil rights and social progress.  Keep them coming, Joe.